Our one and only Planet

 

The Earth is 4.51 billion years old, and we have been around for six million years. For millennia’s our species has relied on the environment for Food, water, and clothing. But for the past 200 hundred years, we have taken our environment for granted. A population boom in the 1960s depleted more resources form our environment. A worldwide famine occurred in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation.

 

                Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero, and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

                Listening to his speech, after the voyager 1 took its last photo made me realize that we are one of a kind. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. This world is finite, and we are running out of time to fix it. We deplete the environment's resources before it can replenish them. It only takes a second for us to destroy what our environment was replenishing. The coronavirus pandemic is an unbelievably bad happening for us humans but is good news to our Earth. Because of this pandemic, our environment has taken a break. Since our appearance on the face of this planet, we have sought it for its resources and because of our greed, depleted its resources. We are one of many species living on this planet, just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet.  We must come to the realization that there is only one earth and we must take care of it. Once we accept that this our first and last home, we will start taking care of it.The project made by DENR is a very good way to wake up fellow students about the ongoing climate change. We should all help better our environment.

 

                The pandemic caused skies that were once filled with smoke and toxins to be cleansed. Cities that you would never imagine having blue skies, suddenly they were clearer than ever. Nature does not need us, but we need nature. The pillars of our civilization have been the environment. Without it we would never have gotten this far. We should take care of one another before it’s too late.

 

Citations 

Image 1: NASA, September 13 2013. Retrieved from http://scitechdaily.com/astronaut-scott-kelly-views-the-nile-at-night-from-the-international-space-station/

Image 2: NASA October 12, 2012. Retrieved from ww.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot